The fact that the new entity happens to be headed by a lawyer — former ABC News head David Westin — has added to the suspicion that NewsRight is intended to be a lawsuit machine, but the new CEO says the purpose of the company is mainly to help members see where their content is being used, then open the door to licensing. “We’re not a litigation shop,” Westin told PaidContent. NewsRight uses the AP’s “Beacon” technology to track content, which wraps all of its published material in a digital envelope that can be tracked even when only small pieces of the content are used.

[T]o the benefit of companies who themselves are not hiring reporters, or at least not very many reporters. They are relying on content taken from websites of the traditional news providers.

The Associated Press has spent years fighting the web and the way it has disrupted the traditional ecosystem the newswire has relied on for decades. It first started talking about a news registry as far back as 2008, and it was clear at the time that the main purpose was to crack down on anyone using even small portions of the company’s content. One of its earliest targets was Google News, which the AP accused of stealing content from members — even though the use of short excerpts with links to the original is arguably covered by the “fair use” clause in U.S. copyright law.

Some news entities, like The Guardian, have tried to take advantage of the new ecosystem of news by turning themselves into an open platform — but others like the AP seem determined to reinvent the monopolies they used to have before the web. For NewsRight, the big test will come when it offers onerous licensing terms to an aggregator: What happens when an organization like The Huffington Post says no thank you? That’s when it will become obvious how much of NewsRight’s business model is based on carrots, and how much of it is about waving a big stick.